Welcome! Thanks for dropping by.

This is definitely a studio in progress, full of unframed canvases and working
snapshots tacked up to the walls. Rather than close the door in your face until
I can put together a tidy Open House, I'll let you wander around and poke through
the stacks yourself.

I do primarily digital photography, and am a novice at the image manipulation tools.
Even simple tools like MS Photo Editor can be fun, though-- take a look at my
flower transforms
to see where I'm starting to go. I realized that I had very strong ideas about
what kinds of images I wanted to start with as a base to transform, so I needed to
go out and take them myself rather than try to find pictures to start from.

Actually, flower close-ups are a bit of a family tradition. My late Uncle Carl,
may he be remembered with a blessing, used to send slides of wildflower closeups with
his family letters. I loved the vivid colors and the sense of peering into a
parallel world. Photos I saw in later years of how bees see flowers in the ultraviolet
only reinforced that sense of exploring a continuum separated from our own by mere
wavelengths of photons, colors of light. I hope to be able to do some blacklight
photography of my own someday, but for now I'll use digital image manipulation to
glimpse into places that might be hiding right under our eyes.

I purchased a surplus Logitech PageScan USB scanner at a ham radio flea market
in early June 2001, and to my delight it can scan in color at a higher resolution
than my laptop has memory to process. :-) I settled on 300dpi as a good compromise,
and am slowly bringing some of my non-digital art into the site. [It is right now
a mess, things are not in the right directories, etc. Sorry! 06/16/2001]

I've chosen not to upload the original, higher-resolution versions of my images at
this time, partly to save space on art.net and partly to keep control of publication-quality
versions of my art. If you would like to use any of my images as screen backgrounds for
personal, non-commercial use, I've created a directory of screen-sized
versions of some of my favorite shots. If would like to use images commercially,
please contact me (strata AT THE SITE art.net) to make arrangements. I am happy to allow
non-profit groups to use these images in websites, calendars, etc, if they contact me first
for permission. All images not already copyright by art.net are copyright Strata Chalup,
and all rights are reserved.